The Wildness Lies in Wait

Job 30:26-27 "When I expected good, then evil came; When I waited for light, then darkness came. "I am seething within and cannot relax; days of affliction confront me.

The Book of Job is a masterful piece of literature, probing the depths of our common human lot and stretching us to the point of moral fatigue. In these two verses, Job describes the essence of our trouble in this world. We expect something good and something bad takes us by a violent surprise. The order of the world, the movement of the heavens, the measured clockwork of light and dark is temporarily suspended and we’re no longer sure what will come our way.

Wisdom teaches that “hope deferred makes the heart sick” and many of us are sick with precisely that epidemic. We are struggling with failed expectations and unrealized dreams. Job bought into the formula: God blesses those who are obedient to the covenant (Deuteronomy 28). Job was obedient. Job was outrageously blessed. And then Job lost the external signs of that blessing - his possessions, his clarity of purpose, his children, his health, his honor, his peace of mind.

Reading Job, I am reminded of Chesterton’s observation:

“The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait” (Chesterton, Orthodoxy)

Relevance is a Crock

In a recent interview published in Christianity Today, Eugene Peterson offers his take on the question of the church's relevance. Relevance is, of course, the buzz word for the entrepreneurial marketers of the church who want to make sure the church does not have an image problem.

Peterson was asked: "What if we to frame this not in terms of needs but relevance? Many Christians hope to speak to generation X or Y or postmoderns, or some subgroup, like cowboys or bikers - people for whom the typical church seems irrelevant."

At the end of Peterson's response, he writes: "I think relevance is a crock. I don't think people care a whole lot about what kind of music you have or how you shape the service. They want a place where God is taken seriously, where they're taken seriously, where there is no manipulation of their emotions or their consuming needs. Why did we get captured by this advertising, publicity mindset? I think it's destroying our church."

Lenten Poem

I told my dad last night that I gave up Missouri Tiger basketball for Lent. Wise to the ways of the heart as he is, he challenged my level of sacrifice. "How hard is it to give up Missouri basketball?", he asked. Not hard at all, in fact; which is also why I am willing to part with eating black licorice and drinking Diet Pepsi for the next few weeks.

It is easy to give up what is not costly. Reading the Bible, I am struck by what the saints of God undergo in the fast which God chooses. My Lenten poem reflects on the dangers that await us in the discovery of grace.

__________________________________________
“Is this not the fast that I choose”
Isaiah 58:6

Choose your own fast
before God does.
His might leave you hopeless and heartless-
boiled over and broken.
The Lord gives.
The Lord takes away.
Before long you’ll quit using
first person possessive pronouns
for there will be nothing left to possess,
nothing to call “mine.”

It happened to Abraham.
God gave the old dog a new trick,
promising him a son.
And as crazy as it was,
Abraham fell for it.
With his praying imagination
stretched
from down to up
from the sandy shore to the star-studded sky
Abraham believed the promise of things to come.
For twenty-five long years,
he waited and
playfully, expectantly
made love to his wife.

When at last the boy was born,
when at last first steps were taken
and first words spoken,
after wounds were mended,
hugs exchanged, dreams dreamt, lessons learned -
God asked for His gift back.

Take your son, He ordered.
Your only son, He added for effect.
Whom you love, if more effect was still needed.
And offer him.
(‘Son’ surely would have sufficed.
Of course Abraham knew whom God had in mind.
But God supplied some appositional phrases
to heighten the agony of sacrifice.)

Abraham offered.
Tenderness gave way to the torture of obedience
and the patriarch readied his hand to slaughter his son.

For one brief moment
measured as one-Mississippi
the world hung in the balance.

Yes, we all know
God changed his mind,
Abraham was intercepted,
Isaac was spared
and a million more people are alive because
an old man held up when an angel said stop.
But really -
dare we get so dangerously close to One
who would dare us this close to danger?

And then there’s Jacob.
The madman was a bit brash, you must admit,
believing he could wrestle with God and win.
He did surprisingly well.
Hung in there all night until late in the third period.
Then God broke his hipbone in two places
and left him with a permanent limp.

And Job.
Blameless Job. Devout Job.
God-fearing Job. Evil-shunning Job.
Need I tell you what happened to
the greatest man in the east?
In a smoke-filled room in some cosmic casino,
God boasted of Job and baited Satan into a bet.
(Or maybe it was the other way around.)
And then the gambling got going
the dice started rolling
and the poker chips were laid down.

God didn’t have anything to lose so He bet it all.
The accuser, ever a risk-taker, matched Him chip for chip.
Strangely, Job lost everything on a bet he didn’t place.
In fact, Job didn’t even know he was in a game
much less, was the game.

“Your animals are dead, master.
The camels, oxen, donkeys, sheep – lost.
Your servants, too.
Oh, and by the way, master
your children won’t be coming
over this weekend.
They’re dead. All of them.
And I alone have escaped to tell you.”

As if the loss of every single possession
was not enough to test a bet
and call a winner
the deceiver insisted on “double or nothing.”
So Job was asked –
well, no, that would imply some participation
in one’s own demise -
Job was forced
to give up his skin,
stripping down to the bone
leaving him without face or friend.
And all this,
so the game could keep going.

His wife looked at him aghast:
“Job? Is that you, Job?
“What is...that...all over your body?
Job, what has happened to you?
I hope you’ll finally give up that pious bullshit
and curse God and die.”

And die he did.
On Wednesday he sat alone in the Ash heap.
And for the next forty days
he kept on dying.

- TLT
Lent 2005

Changing the Water into Wine - Again

Jesus once changed the water into wine. Some of his followers have spent quite a bit of time trying to change the wine back into water. As a Veteran of Feuds Over Wine, entitled to my own seat at the table in the local V.F.W. Hall, I raise a toast in honor of two fellow combatants, Frederick Buechner and Philip J. Lee.

Buechner, reflecting on his early days as an ordained minister, writes:
“It was at Exeter, too, that for the first time I conducted a communion service, presiding over the table laid with a fair white cloth by a couple of faculty wives, and with the Pepperidge Farm bread that Judy and I had sliced up into little cubes in the kitchen at home, and the trays full of Welch’s grape juice served in glass thimbles so that everybody could be served in separately and antiseptically without leaving their seats. The symbolism couldn’t be worse, I thought and still think, and it seemed a wretched way to do it. There should be real wine, of course, to warm the heart and stir the blood. There should be a common cup, germs be damned. People should come to the table. Together. But even so, to stand in for Christ as host at that strange feast always moved me. “Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden....”
Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation, 72

Lee adds,
“The irony of Protestant history is that although the sixteenth-century Reformers fought like tigers to restore the wine to the people, their descendants have now deprived the people of both bread and wine. The Protestant celebration, when it is on rare occasions held, has been spiritualized to the extent that it could scarecly be recognized as a meal at all. The purely symbolic wafer of the Roman celebration, which John Knox thundered against as a distortion of Christ’s ‘common bread’ has in most Protestant churches been replaced by minute, carefully diced pieces of bread unlike any other bread ever eaten by any culture. The common cup which the medieval Church withheld from the faithful is, except among Anglicans, still the sole possession of the clergy. The unordained are now given thimble-like glasses filled with Welch’s grape juice. The symbolism is quite clear. We all come before God individually; with our individual bits of bread and our individual cups of juice, we are not of one loaf and one chalice. Our relationship to Christ is private and personal. What may be even more significant is that by partaking of this unearthly meal with our unbreadly bread and our unwinely wine we are making a clear statement that the bread and wine of spiritual communion has no connection with earthly communion. It is an unmistakable gnostic witness against the significance of ordinary meals and common bread, wine, the table fellowship of laughter and tears." Against the Protestant Gnostics, p. 272